An email I received a few days ago read: "Just so you know, the Iranian community worldwide is about to boycott your newspaper solely because you have decided arbitrarily to use the term 'the Gulf' in place of 'the Persian Gulf' in your articles."

The writer, tacitly acknowledging the global reach of the Guardian, may have been reading the style guide, which is specific on this point: "The Gulf - not the Persian or Arabian Gulf." This is the form used on most occasions, as in "America is building up its naval and air forces in the Gulf to put pressure on Iran ... "

Despite the urging of the style guide, it is still referred to occasionally as "the Persian Gulf", for example when it is mentioned in a historical context, or when it is necessary to distinguish it in some additional way from any other gulf. The Guardian's favoured default dictionary, Collins, supports the idea that when we say "the Gulf" we generally know which gulf we are talking about. Its first definition of the word, with a capital G, is "the Persian Gulf".

The preference for calling it "the Gulf" is not something that the Guardian has suddenly or arbitrarily introduced. It dates from at least the time of the first Gulf war, which we have referred to as "the Persian Gulf war" at least nine times in the past six years. On even rarer occasions we have referred to "the Persian Gulf states", which for some is also a provocative formation. To the Arab states in the Gulf it is the Arabian Gulf.

A Guardian journalist who was foreign editor for part of the 1990s promoted the term "the Gulf" on his pages because of its neutrality, deliberately avoiding both "the Persian Gulf" and "the Arabian Gulf". It still seems a reasonable course to take and a small matter in the current priorities of the region. A subject of greater discussion has been the term "friendly fire", arising from the revelation earlier this month of more details of the US air attack in Iraq which killed Lance Corporal of Horse Matty Hull. The discussion was about the provenance of the term and whether the Guardian was right to use it without any quotation marks.

Dictionary entries seem to suggest a root in the way the word "friendly" was used in the first world war to denote a shell fired by the allied side. "Friendly fire" had certainly emerged as a self-contained term by the time of the first Gulf war. The Oxford English Dictionary quotes from the Independent of February 22 1991: "Since the war began, more American troops are thought to have been killed by 'friendly fire' than by the Iraqis ... " Note the quotes.

The Guardian front-page headline on its report about Matty Hull read: British took part in friendly fire inquiry which cleared US pilots.

The absence of quotation marks anywhere there led the chief news subeditor on Guardian Unlimited to put a quick question to the editor of the style guide: "Is there any reason why the paper isn't using quote marks around the term friendly fire, as we do with 'war on terror'?"

In a leader about Matty Hull, the same day, the Guardian referred to "so-called friendly fire". The Guardian's security affairs editor told me that he always puts the phrase in quotation marks to signal that he is using it without adopting it as his own. The quotation marks, he says, are nearly always removed in the editing.

Whether its origin is among soldiers in the trenches of the first world war or not, for many it is perceived as carrying the taint of military propaganda, and they therefore believe that quotation marks should be used as a distancing device, treating it like other euphemisms of our time: "axis of evil", "war on terror", "collateral damage".

The style guide editor believes that friendly fire has entered the language, and he thinks using it without quotes is all right. Collins says it succinctly: firing by one's own side, esp when it harms one's own personnel.

· How else would you say it? Ian Mayes is president of the Organisation of News Ombudsmen reader@theguardian.com